The Howerter Blog » ip telephony

Trixbox

Jay Howerter — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:29:33 +0000

After “deciding” to use Asterisk yesterday, I was talking to a friend and he pointed me to Trixbox. Trixbox is based on Asterisk but has a lot of cool things and installs in appliance mode. Basically, it looks like you install the product and it installs Linux, PHP, MySQL, etc. Can’t wait to try it.

Asterisk

Jay Howerter — Tue, 19 May 2009 19:34:07 +0000

I have started reading about Asterisk the open source PBX. I am installing it at my house. Since I have Vonage I can use Asterisk to connect directly via a SIP trunk. This way I will not have to use the Vonage adapter. Katherine doesn’t see the purpose of this project. I think I just feel ashamed to be a VOIP guy and not have a IP-PBX at my house.

IP Telephony Migration Part 3 (Switchover)

Jay Howerter — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 19:42:31 +0000

After an entire year of preparation, It was finally time to switch the incoming phone circuits to the new gateways. We made the switch on a Friday night so we could have the entire weekend to fix any problems that came up.

The physical switchover was pretty smooth. On Saturday morning, I started switching the paging system over and my coworkers began switching the analog phones and entry way phones to the new system. It took most of the day to complete and test everything.

That was it!!

Since the switch we have been dealing with little problems and specific configuration issues. All in all, it was a successful project.

IP Telephony Migration Part 2 (Rollout)

Jay Howerter — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 18:41:41 +0000

When the infrastructure was complete we began issuing phones. First, we gave our department phones and trained them on all the features and what to tell the users. After that was done, we began rolling out the phones to users. We started with about 20 people at a time. We sent an extensive email out to every employee explaining what the procedure was and an interactive help system describing all the features. Many users didn’t give this email a second look. After we placed the phones we did another walk around to make sure they had no questions. There were many confused faces, since they didn’t bother to read the email. There were a handful of users that genuinely knew what was going on. They really didn’t need any help. Those users were a breath of fresh air. The majority of users didn’t have the time to train.

While the rest of my department was doing the rollout, I was finishing setting up hunt groups, writing out the scripts for the automated attendant so they could be recorded. This process was only scheduled to take about two weeks, but it ended up taking the better part of a month. Because of this, I had to postpone configuring our E911 system.

The state of Illinois requires businesses with multi-building campuses, and/or buildings with more than 40,000 square foot per floor to be compliant with E911. This means that each building or 40,000 square foot floor must provide the phone company with a unique phone number so that 911 can determine where the caller is located. Cisco has a product that determines the location of the phone by the switch port it is located in and then sends the correct information to the 911 operator. This project is still ongoing, but almost completed.

Anyway, back to the rollout. We finished the phone rollout in about three weeks. There was about a month between when the last phone was issued and when the switchover took place. At this point there were only a couple of things left to do…

IP Telephony Migration Part 1 (Preparation)

Jay Howerter — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 19:15:43 +0000

This year I started my first big project at work. It was decided to convert our old PBX to Cisco IP telephony. Over the last couple of years, we have been slowly converting all of our remote offices to centralized Cisco IP telephony. Those were easy projects due to the users not knowing anything different. The Cisco IP telephony solution is pretty user friendly, but we all know that users don’t like change. So, I started the daunghting task of making the new phone system as much like the old system as possible. I found it difficult to start on a task this big. The current phone system had been up for 16 years. In 16 years, there were a lot of customizations performed that I had to figure out. Of course, there was no way to get them all, but I did my best. It seemed like every week, I would find something that I had forgotten.

Since I started this job in 2005, I had been taking notes on what would need to be done for this conversion. This served as a decent starting place. First thing up was the infrastructure. Our network infrastructure was mostly configured for IP telephony already, due to our remote offices. We had purchased PoE switches and replaced every non-PoE switch in the main campus. QoS was configured on every switch port and every router interface. We decided that we wanted some features that were included in the newest version of Cisco Communication Manager (CallManager). Since I had upgraded to a version of CallManger that Cisco was pushing (aparentley to early), there was no upgrade path to the newest version. This means there was no upgrade program to copy all my settings and install them on the new system. This meant I had to do this manually, which took me about a week. This was definitely not a fun task, but it was one that had to be done. After this was complete, we moved on to rolling out the phones to users…